Elders May Beat Young Adults at Correcting Mistakes

Research suggests older adults can learn to do some things quicker than younger counterparts, especially when it comes to correcting mistakes.

In the study, Columbia University researchers found older adults were actually better than young adults at correcting their mistakes on a general information quiz.

Research findings appear in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“The take-home message is that there are some things that older adults can learn extremely well, even better than young adults. Correcting their factual errors — all of their errors — is one of them,” said psychological scientists Drs. Janet Metcalfe and David Friedman.

“There is such a negative stereotype about older adults’ cognitive abilities but our findings indicate that reality may not be as bleak as the stereotype implies.”

In the study, researchers explored a phenomenon known as the “hypercorrection effect.” According to the effect, when people are very confident about an answer that turns out to be wrong, they tend to correct it; when they’re initially unsure about the answer, however, they’re less likely to correct it.

Previous research has shown that the effect is robust in college students and children, but not as strong in older adults. The investigators wanted to learn why this behavior occurs.

One possibility is that older adults don’t show a strong hypercorrection effect because they’re not very good at correcting so-called “high-confidence errors.” But it could also be that the effect doesn’t emerge for older adults because they’re actually better than young adults at correcting low-confidence errors.

In the experiment, the researchers tested both behavioral measures and measures of brain activity to understand participants’ performance. They recruited 44 young adults (around 24 years old) and 45 older adults (around 74 years old) to participate in the study. None of the participants had any history or symptoms of neurological or psychiatric disorder or impairment.

The participants were fitted with an EEG cap and presented with a series of general information questions that covered a variety of topics (e.g., “In what ancient city were the Hanging Gardens located?”); they were encouraged to guess when they were unsure but they were allowed to say “I don’t know.”

The participants were asked to rate how confident they were in their response on a seven point scale, and were then given the correct answer (e.g., Babylon). The brain’s electrical activity was measured while the corrective feedback was displayed.

This process continued until the participant had made errors on at least 20 high-confidence and 20 low-confidence answers; on average, this required about 244 questions for the older adults and about 230 questions for the younger adults.

The EEG cap was removed and participants were given a surprise retest. The retest included 20 questions that had led to high-confidence errors, 20 questions that resulted in low-confidence errors, and 20 questions that were not answered.

As expected, the results showed that older adults were better at answering the general knowledge questions. On average, they answered 41 percent of the questions correctly, while the young adults got only 26 percent right.

Older adults also tended to be more confident in their answers, but both age groups reported greater confidence in the answers they ended up getting right than the ones that they got wrong.

The findings showed that older adults corrected more errors overall than the young adults did, indicating that they were better at updating their existing knowledge with new information.

More importantly, they also corrected more of their low-confidence errors. Together, these findings indicate that the older adults were less susceptible to the hypercorrection effect than younger adults were.

Individual brain activity was consistent with the behavioral results. Both age groups showed a larger P3a component — a brain wave indicating attentional processing — for feedback on high-confidence errors than for feedback on low-confidence errors. But, relative to the young adults, older adults produced a larger P3a to low-confidence-error feedback.

According to the researchers, this pattern of results suggests a focus of attention that reflects the older adults’ priorities: “They care very much about the truth, they don’t want to make mistakes, and they recruit their attention to get it right,” Metcalfe and Friedman.

The findings may challenge common beliefs about older adults’ cognitive abilities, but they also provide a bit of optimism for everyone, regardless of age.

“To be sure, older adults should be heartened by our results — the older adults did splendidly in our study,” Metcalfe and Friedman note. “But we all grow old, so younger adults should be encouraged, too.”

Related Articles

About Rick Nauert PhD

Dr. Rick Nauert has over 25 years experience in clinical, administrative and academic healthcare. He is currently an associate professor for Rocky Mountain University of Health Professionals doctoral program in health promotion and wellness. Dr. Nauert began his career as a clinical physical therapist and served as a regional manager for a publicly traded multidisciplinary rehabilitation agency for 12 years. He has masters degrees in health-fitness management and healthcare administration and a doctoral degree from The University of Texas at Austin focused on health care informatics, health administration, health education and health policy. His research efforts included the area of telehealth with a specialty in disease management.